Flugdächer der Moderne. Die Tankstellen des Lothar Rübelt

Abstract

At first glance, a photograph of a gas station around 1960 seems to be an image of marginal importance. Interest is only aroused when it is found in the picture archive of the Austrian National Library (ÖNB) and radiates high artistic skill. This is not surprising, since the photographer’s name is Lothar Rübelt. In the photos of the gas stations, Lothar Rübelt’s biography and his changing photographic design principles on the one hand and the interests of the clients of the advertising images on the other are intermingled with fundamental meanings of mobility and movement, of urbanity and rurality, of architecture and spatial order, of locality and globalization. This article asks, how the “architectural specification” of gas stations and their staging by Lothar Rübelt mix with practices of Austrian everyday culture and how the acceleration embodied in photography as well as in automobilism became transformed.